Food for thought: You are an affluent brown belt practicing BJJ in Brazil; you want to come to the united states but you can't get a work visa. You are offered promotion to black and a job teaching for a Barra affiliate in the US, for a fee. Now assuming you pay up, and everything works out splendidly for you, what do you think your employer (Barra) might be able to coerce you into doing, saying, not doing, not saying or just plain going along with? Remember, the association you work for and the federation that certifies your rank are owned by the same group of people. And if you lose your belt you will lose your visa,and be deported.

Now darkness comes; you don't know if the whales are coming. - Royce Gracie

Wondering if RICO applies in any way, given the history of extortion exhibited by the GB group?

I can be much simpler and less dramatic than people with criminal records, Hungry Joe. For example, there are LOADS of martial arts instructors that come to the USA and Canada on tourist visas (which stipulate that you are NOT ALLOWED to work while in the country) and make loads of undeclared cash teaching, running seminars and workshops, grading, etc.

Not everyone has the time to go through all the links. (I'm not implying we're all lazy; some of us genuinely don't have the time.) That being the case, could you summarize how all of this affects the average BJJ player?

Without reading too closely, you could see instructions with inflated rank, whole schools losing their lineage if their instructor refuses to play ball, and the previously documented fact that good grapplers are getting shut out of tournaments.

Without reading too closely, you could see instructions with inflated rank, whole schools losing their lineage if their instructor refuses to play ball, and the previously documented fact that good grapplers are getting shut out of tournaments.

Correct. It also leads to fully certified Brazilian "black belts" who refuse to grapple, ot even allow their students to roll, and eventually lose their teaching gig entirely because they get tooled by blue belts. As happened at your gym.

Now darkness comes; you don't know if the whales are coming. - Royce Gracie

I find this very interesting because, for a long time, most BJJ schools in my city didn't have a permanent / full-time black belt head instructor. (Most of them had an out-of-town or out-of-country black belt affiliate head instructor but the training was generally delivered by an in-house purple or brown belt.) In fact, at one point, there were several BJJ schools in town but only one legitmate BJJ black belt instructor in the entire city. Is this standard practice? (A lot of these schools had/have what I assume were legitimate affiliations like Renzo Gracie BJJ, Carlson Gracie BJJ, RCJ Machado BJJ, BTT Canada, Drysdale BJJ, etc.)

I find this very interesting because, for a long time, most BJJ schools in my city didn't have a permanent / full-time black belt head instructor. (Most of them had an out-of-town or out-of-country black belt affiliate head instructor but the training was generally delivered by an in-house purple or brown belt.) In fact, at one point, there were several BJJ schools in town but only one legitmate BJJ black belt instructor in the entire city. Is this standard practice? (A lot of these schools had/have what I assume were legitimate affiliations like Renzo Gracie BJJ, Carlson Gracie BJJ, RCJ Machado BJJ, BTT Canada, Drysdale BJJ, etc.)

It seems to be that way in Milwaukee. Most of the MA clubs with BJJ programs have black belt Henry Matamoros as their top guy, but he's only around some of the time at any given club.

The best I can do is encourage you to read what you are able to read and think about how it affects you. You might start by going over the IBJJF certified rules for sport BJJ (http://ibjjf.org/wp-content/uploads/...okIBJJF_v2.pdf ) and ask yourself if there is any basis for the notion that BJJ is a team sport. Now look around your BJJ community and see if anyone you know was required to join a team (association) before being allowed to compete as an individual. Those teams are, in reality, business associations for which affiliated gyms pay substantial membership fees. That cost is passed off to you as the consumer. Depending on rank and venue, attempting to bypass team affiliation by joining an independent gym may cause you to be excluded from IBJJF championship and open competitions. This aspect affects every BJJ player regardless of rank; for advanced players and those that run their own program, there are more, and more serious, consequences than those described above.

Hope this helps. If the amount of reading is daunting, pick one link and read every thing there; you will be one of the better informed people on the web on that aspect of this mess.

Now darkness comes; you don't know if the whales are coming. - Royce Gracie

I'll read what I can whenever I can. I'm not involved in the BJJ scene anymore but I find this short of stuff interesting since I feel like I'm still on the outskirts looking in. (I'm now doing Judo but still have a lot of friends doing BJJ at a variety of schools around town.)

I've always gotten the impression that the BJJ scene was essentially a pyramid scheme. (I'm using "scheme" in the literal sense; not implying that there's something shady about it.) A local school has pay for its legitimacy by getting a reputable affiliation. The school must meet the affiliation's demands or else risk losing it's affiliation / legitimacy. All the branding and requirements to buy affiliation-branded gear, patches, gis (etc.) is to send money up the food chain and to promote the affiliation's brand.

It became apparent that these arrangements can get tricky when many of the local MA schools which had not previously been associated with MMA and BJJ started to offer BJJ programs from the same affiliate, only to all drop that one affiliate and jump to another after a few years later. To this day, I still see a variety of schools cycling through a variety of affiliates every 2 years or so.